One of the most important and powerful things we as parents can do for our children, is provide them with a regular, open understanding of how thinking – the result of our heart, brain and body processing energy and information from our inside environment and our outside environment – leads to action. Psychology offers a number of terms for this process. Theory of Mind is one. Mindsight is another. Providing our children with frequent access to the workings of our mind appears to support a number of important developmental milestones.One thing expressing what we think and feel appears to do is substantially increase both the quantity and number of connections of mirror neurons in our children’s developing brains. These increased quantities and connections seem to be an important element necessary for promoting growth in certain key brain areas like the medial frontal cortex, the temporal lobes and the temporoparietal junction – areas most responsible for the cultivation of empathy in human beings. If we don’t teach our children how what we say and do is affected by what we think and feel, they won’t be able to understand how that process works in themselves. And if they don’t understand it in themselves, they can’t understand it in others. Without being able to understand what might be going on in others, it becomes virtually impossible to have empathy for them. Without the capacity for empathy, all kinds of unskillful thoughts and actions become possible.So how do we actually provide children access to the workings of our own minds? First of all, we have to access an awareness and understanding of its workings our self, obviously. If we as parents aren’t able to make the connections between what we think and how thoughts are connected to both feelings and our actual behavior in the world, then it’s not only going to be difficult to convey that awareness to our children, but it will likely also be a challenge for us to fully understand it’s importance.